I keep my blog as a personal record of what I'm up to, which might be seen as working towards "An elegant sufficiency, content, retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books, ease and alternate labour, useful life". I'm certainly not there yet. There is quite some way to go!

Mar 19

Mar 19 Finished.

After a great deal of effort this week, at last I can clear the decks of everything South America-related and move on to other things (I have quite a list). I really ought to have resisted the temptation to do as I always do and taken my hero’s advice to forget about creating a journal this time round, for it ended up being a bit half-hearted and mainly a repository for one of two bits of ephemera which wouldn’t fit elsewhere.

I’d used the little grey Moleskine cahiers to scribble in as I went and as usual, the notes I jotted in there are a much more effective means of recording the story than anything. This was the small drawing I did following our flight over the Nazca Lines in Peru. Nothing more needed really, don’t you agree?

As usual, I feel I can be quite free to write down my thoughts in there!

It’s also a great way to spend five minutes here and there, practising my drawing. I don’t feel constrained to create a pretty page or to get everything correct – I scribble and cross things out and don’t feel I’m making a respectable piece of work. I’m just jotting stuff down.

Whereas in my journal, I feel I have to make something more attractive and “finished”.

After a few days I had developed a common style for each page with the date, the weather and where we were. I tried to draw and paint a couple of things in there but that paper just wouldn’t stand up to anything vaguely wet. Even the rubber stamp ink soaked through if I wasn’t careful.

So occasionally, it was hard to fill the rest of the page and as a result, there’s quite a lot of blank space.

I filled a whole page with the cut out Andean cross pattern and went on to fill the opposite side with a few details about the day.

By the time I got to the last couple of days, I really struggled to finish it.

I felt that on this occasion I’d told the same stories over and over again. Why? There really wasn’t any need to create that journal at all and I ought to have given it up before I went too far with it. Never mind. I’ll remember for next time!